Challenges, uncertainties and violence prevention: The case of Batan neighborhood in the city Rio de Janeiro

This article is result of ethnographic research with residents of borough of Batan, located in the west of the City of Rio de Janeiro. Currently, this neighborhood has a Peacemaker Police Unit (UPP), part of public security policy of state Government of Rio de Janeiro that returned basic civil rights to this community. However, for more than 20 years, residents have lived with armed traffickers and subsequently militiamen.

Batan has 40,000 inhabitants, distributed in 15,000 households. In a recent survey of FIRJAN-IETS in communities with UPPs, socioeconomic data revealed that the Batan has the lowest household income per capita among all the nine communities studied: R$ 406.10.

 It is also the highest percentage of poor (36.6%) and indigent population (12.3%). So it is not surprising that there is  the highest unemployment rate (19.7%) among the nine communities investigated.

About 5% of the population of Batan did not have basic official documents. 36.5% of young people between 15 and 24 years of age do not study or work. 

Despite the restoration of basic civil rights by expulsion of militia, residents expressed doubts, anxieties, and tensions about the permanence of policing project and revealed political conflicts involving Association of Residents, still seen as linked to the militias and acting as an intermediary in real estate transactions.

Tensions, dilemmas, conflicts and insecurities arising from uncertainty about the rules to be followed in the new type of policing, more uncertainty about the continuity of occupation in future governments will be analyzed, as well as the multiplicity of perceptions of the residents interviewed on the current experience with the UPP. 

Finally, the social projects that are developing in this new environment full of uncertainties and tensions will be evaluated.